


221B Baker Street

by avulle



Series: 221B Baker Street [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Azula is Sherlock Holmes, Crack, Gen, I have no idea who the dick-ish other police officer is supposed to be, Katara is Watson, Lin is the long-suffering Inspector Lestrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-16
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-27 01:45:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6264688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avulle/pseuds/avulle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of vaguely consistent drabbles revolving around Azula Iwamoto (police consultant extraordinaire) and Katara Wu (long-suffering companion) in modern England.</p><p>Fusion with Sherlock Holmes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introductions

**Author's Note:**

> Earth and Fire was originally intended to be a prequel-like story of a college-aged Azula and Toph from this universe, but it diverged fairly early on. The two stories still share much of the same setting, and almost all of the culture/mythos is shared between the two.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I first became acquainted with Azula Iwamoto from a friend of a friend, or, perhaps, from an acquaintance of an acquaintance.

I first became acquainted with Azula Iwamoto from a friend of a friend, or, perhaps, from an acquaintance of an acquaintance. An old man by the name of Fung Zhang, who was introduced to me by way of an old companion from the service when he heard I was looking for a place to stay.

I first met her at police precinct. According to my old companion, it was the most reliable place to get a hold of her, if I so desired, and she would most certainly be there at five o’clock sharp, the next day. It was at that point that I became mildly unsure of my decision to perhaps take a room with her, but a soldier’s pension and a not-quite-doctor’s salary really weren’t enough to support oneself in the center of London, so I decided to go for it anyways.

She was exactly where I was told she would be, exactly when I was told she would be there, but she was not at all like I expected her to be.

I had no sooner entered the precinct that I saw her. She was very hard to miss, and at sight I both knew she was who I was looking for, but also hoped dearly that I was wrong.

She was dressed in full old-world finery, with long robes of red and black draped elegantly over her figure. A large mass of straight black locks tumbled down her back, and carefully pinned behind her head in an artful mess that could only have been more complete with a topknot. Her skin was a deathly pale, and her eyes, when they turned to me, were a brilliant gold.

On anyone but her, it would have been a joke, a fashion disaster of the highest order, but, with the way she held herself, it was anything but. Instead of the world around her making her look wildly out of place, she successfully implied that it was the world that was wrong, and she alone who was right.

When our eyes met, hers widened briefly in recognition and then her lips parted over white teeth, and she smiled at me. “You must be Dr. Wu,” she called out smoothly to me across the room. “You’re just in time.” She raised her hand above her hand and beckoned to me in a way I hadn’t ever actually seen anyone do before, but had seen in all manner of films of an entirely different time.

I silently repressed the urge to straighten the loops in my hair, and dutifully crossed the room. I didn’t know what I was just in time for, but the way the detective to her right shifted uncomfortably, I suspected that it was not leaving to go see the possible shared apartment, as I had so hoped.

“Miss Iwamoto?” I asked, hoping for one last moment to be wrong.

In response, for the briefest of moments, her smile faltered, and her face twisted into grimace. A moment later, however, she extended her hand to me, her face a peaceful, smiling mask once more.

“Call me Azula, please.”

I took it, and her grip was remarkably firm—her fingers altogether more calloused than her appearance would imply.

“In that case, please, call me Katara.”

She smiled brilliantly at me, straight white teeth on display.

“Of course.” She kept my gaze for a moment longer before turning to the man beside her. “Now, detective. Shall we?”

He grimaced, making a sound at the back of his throat like he would like to protest, but ultimately did not.

“This way, Miss Iwamoto,” he turned and inclined his head briefly to me, “Dr. Wu.” He then turned away, and moved smoothly through the assorted desks crowding the busy room towards a door on the far wall.

“Azula,” Azula corrected him, dropping a hand to beckon me to follow.

“No, thank you,” the detective immediately replied.

I followed after them awkwardly, finally reaching up and bumping a stray hair loop back into place.

 

“Is it really alright that I’m here for this?”

I was standing in a rather brightly lit room, with a single light illuminating it from the ceiling, whose only furniture were two metal-backed chairs and very sturdy looking metal table. One of them was filled with a rather large woman, slumped over herself and head nearly resting on the table before her.

The detective had vanished into a neighboring room, and the only people occupying the room were Azula, the woman and myself.

“Oh, of course,” Azula answered, sliding smoothly into the only unoccupied chair. “You don’t mind standing, do you?”

My leg twinged in response, but I simply smiled and nodded.

“Of course not.”

Azula smiled brightly at me, and I swallowed down the way it made something knot, deep in my stomach.

“Now then, Mrs.—”

“Wang.”

The corner of Azula’s lip twisted for a moment before smoothing into a smile again.

“Do you know why you’re here, Mrs. Wang?”

“They think I killed my husband,” the woman muttered into the table.

“Yes,” Azula smiled and nodded. “That’s correct.”

Knots of thick muscle momentarily stood out against the woman’s arms before smoothing back into lumpy softness again.

“Well—did you?”

Azula’s cheery voice echoed harshly across the room.

Knots of thick muscle stood out against the woman’s arms once again, and her fists clenched together in her lap.

“No. I didn’t.”

“Are you sure?” Azula’s voice dropped. “They found you absolutely drenched in his blood.” When she says drenched, her voice caresses it, curling sensually around it, and calling all manner of lewd, improper things to mind.

The woman’s growled, finally raising her gaze to Azula—only for her entire being to recoil in shock the moment her eyes fell upon her. Her face twisted in surprise, and her mouth fell open.

“Yes—no—” the woman blinked harshly, her eyes darting to me, and then back to Azula. “What?”

“Hmmm,” Azula hummed, leaning forward to rest her elbows on the table, and then in turn resting her hands on her interwoven fingers. Her eyelids drooped and she gazed at the woman across from her with a half-lidded gaze. “Really? Are you sure about that?”

Her lips twisted from a bright smile to a more sinister smirk.

“I didn’t kill my husband,” the woman immediately protested. She raised her hands as far as the handcuffs would let her. “It wasn’t me.” The woman who looked very large a moment ago now suddenly seemed very small. Azula, in turn, who looked very small and delicate a moment ago, now looked anything but.

Azula didn’t respond, staring unblinkingly into the other woman’s eyes, as the woman shrunk further and further into her chair. The smirk slipped from her face, and her face became an emotionless mask.

Then Azula heaved out a sigh, and pushed herself to her feet. The chair skittered out from under her.

“How dreadfully boring,” she exclaimed with another put upon sigh, meeting my eyes for the first time since the ordeal began. Her lips twisted into a smirk. “She’s telling the truth.”

Her outfit started to look like a caricature, a role she had suddenly decided she didn’t care for anymore.

 

“You have to be kidding me.”

We were outside the room, with the rather irritated looking detective standing before us and scowling thunderously.

“We found her covered in her husband’s blood. It literally went up to her elbows.”

Azula shrugged, and I awkwardly shifted my stance.

“I don’t really care if you believe me. Feel free to put an innocent woman away. That’s not really my problem.”

Her face lit up in an egregiously fake smile, and she patted him harshly on the shoulder.

“Now get out of my way. We have an apartment to go look at it.” She shifted her shoulders uncomfortably. “And I have this horrible outfit to get out of.” She made a disgusted noise under breath, and sent a disdainful look in the general direction of her abdomen.

“Tell me that you did not allow a civilian into one of my interrogation rooms.”

I turned to face a rather imposing grey-haired woman stomping over to us with murder in her eyes.

“But you always tell me not to lie to you, Inspector.”

The inspector scowled at Azula, before turning her gaze to the detective behind me.

“I wasn’t talking to you, Azula.”

“Technically, Miss Iwamoto is a civilian, Inspector,” came the response from behind me.

With an aggravated sigh, the woman made a harsh gesture in our general direction.

“Get out of my precinct,” the woman growled.

Azula emerged into my field of vision and gestured for me to follow.

“Okay, Inspector. Let me know if you have any more jobs for me.” She paused for a moment, before turning back. “Preferably ones that do not involve dressing up in this kind of ridiculous costume.”

“I did not order you to come into my precinct wearing whatever the hell it is you’re wearing right now, Azula.”

Azula smirked.

“So disrespectful—this is our heritage, Inspector.”

“That ain’t my heritage, Princess.” Azula’s face contorted briefly into an expression I didn’t recognize. “Get out of my precinct.”

Azula turned to me again, her smirk morphing into a conspiratorial smile as she beckoned for me to follow.

“I like you,” she commented as I fell into step behind her. Her fingers flitted down to gesture at my gate. “Soldier?”

“Army doctor.”

An errant hand flitted to touch her hair back into place as she hummed in acknowledgement and turned away.

“Oh, I think that will do quite well.”

 

“I feel like you should know, before we begin anything” she said as we exited the door of the precinct, “that I am a compulsive liar, and terribly manipulative.”

We continued down the stairs to the sidewalk.

“I also get up and about at all hours of the night, and my work brings many a number of unsavory characters to my lodgings rather independent of any schedule of my own.”

They reached the sidewalk, and she held up a hand to flag a taxi.

“Not to mention my generally unpleasant personality, which tends to attract an altogether different kind of attention.”

The taxi arrived before us, and she turned to me.

“Do you think you could live with that?”

This was an excellent set of reasons for me to turn her down, look for lodgings on the edge of the city, where the commute was worse, but the prices much, much better. With a soldier’s pension, I could surely cut my hours a bit, and still be more than well off.

She was even kind enough to give me a convenient out, and reasons beyond You are bizarre, and I do not wish to spend more time than I must with you. She was, in a sense, asking for it.

However, instead of taking her up on her offer, I responded, “I’m sure we can work something out,” and pulled open the door to the taxi before us.

“Excellent,” she commented, smiling fiercely and folding herself elegantly into the taxi.

I quickly followed her, closing the door behind me.

She leaned forward, carefully gathering the deep folds of her robes about her.

“221B Baker Street, please.”

 


	2. Toph Beifong

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I first met Toph Beifong rather loudly, and with much fanfare.

I first met Toph Beifong rather loudly, and with much fanfare.

It was just after noon, on a mild Saturday when Azula did not have a case and I did not have a shift at the hospital, when the door down the stairs banged open, and a loud voice called out something that was not quite intelligible at Fung downstairs. Azula was in her room, taking her afternoon shower, and I was in the common room, catching up on the medical journals I had allowed to fall by the wayside in the excitement that generally accompanied Azula’s cases.

I dearly hoped that the source of the loud voice was an acquaintance of Fung’s, however unlikely that might be, and that it would not ascend the stairs and accost me personally. In the wake of Azula’s rather rapid rise to fame, I had had little personal time in weeks, and I had been very much enjoying it until that very moment.

I had no such luck, and I cannot even recall the title of the article that I had been reading.

“Azula!” the voice yelled, stomping up the stairs with all the subtlety of a rampaging elephant. “I came to visit!”

The door did not open so much as it was blasted open, clattering loudly against the wall to reveal a rather large woman, who looked more or less to be chiseled out of granite, or perhaps solid steel. Her hair was tied messily back into a bun that only cursorily served its purpose, leaving long, thick strands of black hair hanging over her widely grinning face. She flexed her shoulders and squirmed her bare feet into the carpet, her milky green eyes darting blindly around her.

“Augh,” she huffed in frustration, twitching her head and blowing futilely at one of the many locks hanging over her face and groping about for a wall. “Why do you live in a house made of wood, Azula?”

She batted her fist against the closest wall hard enough to make the wall vibrate.

“It’s not wood, and don’t hit it, Toph.”

Azula appeared at the corner, bathrobe pulled hastily around her still-wet form, and bath towel tied crookedly around her head.

“You should get a house made of stone!” Toph called out, voice not dropping in the slightest at Azula’s sudden appearance. “Stone makes a fine house!”

She held out a hand in a direction that only barely included Azula, and Azula caught it automatically.

“Stop yelling,” she chastised. “You’re blind, not deaf.”

Toph grinned down at Azula, blowing halfheartedly at another strand as it fell back across her face.

“You’re just saying that, fire britches.”

She took her hand from the wall and made remarkably accurate swat at Azula backside.

Azula blocked it half-heartedly with her free hand before reaching it up to brush Toph’s hair to the side.

“Oh, you look terrible,” Azula said, smoothing Toph’s hair back behind her ears. “Don’t you even own a mirror?”

“Aha,” Toph jerked her head, causing the strands to fall back into her face again. “Ha.”

Azula smoothed it back again without complaint.

“Please tell me you have a case for me, Toph.” She patted Toph’s hair back one last time. “I am dreadfully bored. I just took my third shower today, just out of boredom.”

“Um—” I began, half standing out of my chair, “Is this a—”

Both of their heads snapped to me.

“Have you been there this whole time?” Toph interrupted, a strand of hair falling into her face, once more.

“Uh—Yes.”

“Sorry, Katara. This is—”

“This is what happens when you have wooden floors, sparkles,” Toph interrupted, turning back to Azula. “Don’t you see?”

“This is Toph, who doesn’t understand the difference between carpet and hardwood.”

“I can tell you that I don’t, that’s for damn sure.”

“Toph, Katara. Katara, Toph.”

Toph glared spitefully at Azula, and Azula smiled brightly at me, lifting her leg to catch Toph’s as it tried to kick her in the shins.

“You know, ‘cause I’m blind.”

“So, is that a no to the case?” Azula asked, turning to drag Toph across the room and into the customer’s couch.

“Yes, that’s a no.” She pulled Azula to a stop before me, and stuck her hand out at me.

“Toph Beifong.”

I twisted my arm so I could reach her hand without being too obvious about how terribly off her aim was.

“Katara Wu.”

She grinned brightly at me, shaking my hand firmly.

“You’re a waterbender, right?” she asked, not releasing my hand.

“Um—yes.”

“How about a nice quick round of pro bending?” She leaned towards me conspiratorially, drawing me forward by my hand. “I know a guy.”

“She’s not that kind of bender, Toph,” Azula said, pulling on her hand until she released me, and then dragging her back onto the couch behind them.

“Everyone’s that kind of bender, Princess.” She turned to grin down at Azula. “They just don’t know it until they meet me.”

I looked between them as Azula heaved out a sigh and settled herself back into the cushions.

“Oh, yes. How could I forget?”

Toph turned back to me, a smug smile on her face.

“We used to play together back in uni. You should have seen her—” Toph shook her head, “—I haven’t been able to play with another firebender, since.”

“You replaced me with an _airbender_ ,” Azula commented drily, adjusting her bathrobe so that I could no longer see straight down it. “I couldn’t have been that irreplaceable.”

“We were the—” Toph began, sweeping her hand before her.

“No, don’t say it,” Azula interrupted.

“—the Rainbow Brigade,” Toph finished smoothly.

Azula sighed.

“Y’know, cause two-thirds of us were—”

Azula elbowed her sharply in the side.

“—were cool,” Toph wheezed out. “The coolest.”

“Do you still play?”

“Do I still—” Toph paused, almost-looked at me incredulously, and then shook her head. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

She leaned forward, her hand tugging and rocking Azula’s form, but failing to move it.

Toph waved her hand in front of her face.

“I’m the Blind Bandit.”

She paused, and after I didn’t respond immediately with the appropriate wonder, she continued.

“Y’know, the best Earthbender in the world? Stopper of semi trucks with my awesome strength, five time champion of the biannual national Earth Rumble?”

Her blind eyes gazed intently at my right ear.

“Captain of the South London Freight Train Brigade?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t really follow sports.”

“You don’t—” Toph nodded disbelievingly at me, turning slowly to Azula, “You don’t really follow sports?”

She nudged Azula.

“You need to get a new roommate, Azula. This one’s defective.”

“No,” Azula answered immediately, head leaned back against the couch, eyes closed. “I like this one, she’s quiet.”

Toph looked at her incredulously for a moment, and Azula’s lips curled into a smirk.

“Also, she has practice as a field medic. Never know when _that_ will come in handy.”

Toph coughed out a laugh, sagging back onto the couch.

“Hmph, figures.”

If memory serves, we then had tea, and a rather delightful little late lunch, and then Toph went home. It was all very eventful, and she was quickly followed by a new client, and I never did get around to finishing my article.


	3. The Agents of Agni

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It took three months for me to finally ask Azula why she had been wearing the robe she had been wearing when we first met.

It took three months for me to finally ask Azula why she had been wearing the robe she had been wearing when we first met. It was a sunny, autumn day, just beginning to get cold, but without the real _bite_ that comes with London winters. Neither of us had yet had to don jacket, if memory serves.

She was between cases—everything important always seems to happen when she was between cases—and the two of us were seated in the common room. She on her phone, of course, tapping idly away at God-knows what, and I was tapping idly away at yet-another blog post.

It was still several months before she had really grown particularly famous, so the blog was really nothing more of a hobby, at the time. But, regardless, while I was in between paragraphs, I recalled that day we had met, and, after silently weighing our relationship in our head, I judged it to be strong enough for the question.

“Azula,” I asked, looking up from my laptop screen.

For a long moment, Azula did not stir, curled into an inhumanly tiny pile of limbs in the corner of her chair, her fingers still tapping away. But then the tapping stopped, and she raised her gaze to look at me over the top of her cell phone.

“Katara.”

“I was wondering,” I said, “why it was you were wearing that robe, when we first met.”

At this, her eyebrows rose, and her posture relaxed, uncurling a bit into a more human position.

“Is this for that silly little blog of yours?” she asked with sneering disdain of hers, but she had let her phone fall into her lap, so I persevered.

“No—I was just curious.”

She gave me another long look, and then unfurled herself completely, suddenly leaning forward, towards me, elbows on her knees. Her face twisted into a smile—that smile that generally meant not-great things for pretty-much-everyone involved.

“Oh, it was nothing, really,” she said, but she was still smiling that smile of hers, so I discounted it as meaningless modesty, and stayed quiet to allow her to continue.

Sure enough, I got my wish, as she waved vaguely at nothing in particular, a gesture she surely intended to be dismissive, but wasn’t, quite.

“The Agents of Agni,” she then continued. “You’ve heard of them, I assume?”

I had, in fact. I doubted very much there was a single person in all of London (in all of the UK—all of the _Western World_ ) who had not.

“Yes, well—” she paused, hints of a smirk playing on her face, “they had a little _show_ planned—you know how they are.”

She said it like she very much believed I did.

“Big fans of explosives, and all that. They’d probably prefer arson, but in modern London—” she shrugged, as if to say _what can you do?_ “You’re never that far from someone who can put out a house fire.” She gave me a contrite-ish look, as if it were just the most terrible thing in the world that firebenders couldn’t go about setting places on fire willy-nilly because the color of the bricks offended them. Had it been two months earlier, I’m sure I would have probably been irritated by that look, but we had lived together for three months, by then, and I had seen the state of Azula’s back, and I had never once seen her firebend anything more than that blue fire in the hearth that never seemed to go out.

“So, explosives,” she continued, heedless of my private musings, her voice still light with the mirth of being better than other people. “They had planted some number bombs in some number of _important places_ in the city—and you should have _seen_ the list of demands they wanted answered or they’d set them off. Honestly, I think Lin was half-convinced they were just bluffing.” Her tone, as she said it, was lilting and mirthful, like it didn’t bother her in the slightest, but I had just barely known her long enough to read her grimace from the hard line of her jaw, the faint wrinkles around her eyes.

“We—Well, Lin—she ever-so-conveniently had one of them in custody, at the time, so I was sent in to have a little chat with the man.”

“You wore that to appease him?” I said, interrupting her in my surprise.

She laughed at that, a remarkably high, light sound. Still chuckling, she smiled at me.

“Oh, heavens no, Doctor.” She leaned a little further forward, inching her way off the seat. “It was far too poor a replica to appease people so _horribly_ obsessed with tradition, and—” she paused, that smile still on her face, “—really, I bought on the way over to the precinct—got it made from a seamstress I happened to know in an _hour and a half_.” She waved her hand airily once more, digressing from her tangent. “Really, it was an atrocious piece of garbage, but—” she wagged her finger at me, half in play, half in probably-honest condescension, “it did do one thing _just right_.”

I thought back to that day, that vision of Azula in red and black ( _atrocious_ , she had called it, as if she knew what a proper robe would look like—like she understood all of the things those _obsessed with tradition_ would have found fault in it), and it clicks. Even I watched those movies, as a child—even I had to study that particular period of our great nation’s history.

“It was a royal robe.”

“It was a royal robe,” she confirmed with a grin, leaning back into her chair. “Once upon a time, it was a literal capital offense for a mere peasant to _wear one_.”

 _For a mere peasant to wear one_.

“He nearly broke his wrists trying to attack me,” she continued with a half smirk, continuing over the echo of her voice in my head. “You should have seen the burns his cuffs left on his wrists—he was literally _boiling_ mad.”

She chuckled to herself in remembrance, sighing a happy sigh that (this time) I couldn’t quite begrudge her for. She then blinked, as if bringing herself back to the present. Another airy wave, and she continued.

“Well, anyways—the man knew where all the bombs were placed—there were two, by the way—but _honestly_ , I don’t think I’ve ever met such a poor liar in my life. He could have started singing the Fire Nation national anthem, and done himself more good.” She blinked, and then fastened her gaze on me. “He probably could have given you a run for your money, doctor.”

I gave her a dubious look, already more than tired of her ever present jabs at how terrible a liar I was (as if it was really such a terrible thing). She ignored it, as she always did, continuing easily with her story.

“I had no more than entered the room, and he was already basically begging us to go find the bombs and defuse them for him, that’s how loose his lips were.” Another laughing shake of her head. “Honestly, I don’t know how those intolerable imbeciles still exist—I’ve never met one with more than two brain cells they could knock together.”

Story apparently finished, she relaxes back into her chair spreading her hands out before her.

“That’s why I was wearing a robe that day, doctor. It was really nothing.”

I doubted that very much—I had seen Azula, on many occasions, trick all manner of hardened criminals into confessing their crimes straight to her face, and when she couldn’t quite do that, rip their secrets straight out of their brains through whatever orifice she could find. (A truly unpleasant image, but, really having witnessed more than once, I still wasn’t quite certain which event I’d rather witness.)

All of that said, of course, there was one bit of information conspicuously missing from her rather grand (rather joking) retelling of the almost-terrorist plot. Something she ordinarily would have divulged to me with great fanfare, but seemingly refrained, on this one and singular occasion.

So, of course, my curiosity begged me to ask (curiosity did kill the cat, after all)—

“Where were they placed?”

When I asked it I was surely expecting some random water tribe shrine (for all of her rash bluntness, she is something of a master of knowing what people can and cannot tolerate hearing), or perhaps an Indian district, far, far from the one that had once been my own.

I assumed she was simply treating me as more delicate than I was, some girl who was still bound tightly to the traditions of the tribes, who would take great offense to them ever being targeted in any way.

I was wrong.

The moment the words were out of my mouth, all of the levity was gone from her face—her pose that had seemed so relaxed before now looked contemplating, her hands tangled together in her lap. The look she gave me through her dark lashes was cold and heavy-lidded. (For a brief moment, I wondered if this was how her suspects felt, just before she ripped everything she wanted straight from the way they held their tea.)

After a moment, she turned her gaze away, her eyes something almost approaching guilty. She took a breath that was almost bracing before saying—

“The Belsize Square Temple,” _see, nothing to worry about_ “and the _New West End Shrine_.”

At the sound of those words, my entire body—my entire being froze. Stalled. “ _What_?” I found myself asking, my lips moving without my permission to ask for clarification I did not need.

Azula simply returned me an apologetic look, filled with a pity I had never before seen grace her face. She didn’t repeat herself because I didn’t actually need her to, and of course she understood that.

There was a long minute of silence between us before I spoke up again.

“How did they even manage to set them there?” And by there I very meant much _in_ my _shrine_ , because I had really already forgotten the name of the first target (I had to ask her again, in fact, just to write what I am writing here now).

Azula’s eyes bored into me a for a long moment before she glanced away and shrugged.

“It’s open to the public,” she explained, of course understanding I didn’t actually care about the temple. “It’s really not that hard.” It was spoken with the idle confidence of someone who had surely pondered what it would have taken to do it, more than once. (Probably on nothing more than an idle whim.)

I looked away, still having not quite processed the information. My brain faltered forward, like an engine turning over at that speed that isn’t quite fast enough to actually catch.

Azula gave it a good long moment before saying—

“I’m sorry, Katara.” After a pause, she continues, “If it’s any consolation, they probably won’t be trying that particular trick any time soon.”

She knew—of course she knew. I didn’t know how she knew, not yet, but—

But of course she knew.

“My brother got married there,” I said.

“I know.”

“My parents were married there—I first _waterbent_ there—”

I took a shuddering breath, and continued not to look at her. The seconds ticked into minutes, and she finally finished my thought.

“You still carry its water.”

My fingers went to the vial beneath my t-shirt.

“Yes.”

Silence fell heavy around us, broken only by the occasional siren from outside our window, and the blue flames burning in our hearth.

“If it makes you feel better,” she added after a moment, “They wouldn’t have been able to pollute the aquifer.”

I looked up at her.

“I checked,” she continued, like it’s the first thing anyone would do. “It would have taken an awful lot more than what they could ever get their hands on to manage something like that.”

I continued to stare at her, not quite sure whether I wanted this information or not—whether I wanted to know _just how much explosives_ it would have taken to poison the water that I held so dear (that I held so far above all others)—and to poison it so badly not even a shrine full of waterbenders could make it true again.

Azula tolerated this silence for perhaps half a minute before going off on a tangent, her voice just a little higher and awkwarder than it should have been.

“During the wars,” she explained, “We never had any trouble taking down the Polar tribes or the swamp tribes—ice melts and wood burns, of course—” _of course_ “—but the cave tribes—” she laughed an awkward laugh“—oh, we lost soldiers by the _battalion_.

“Never managed to take them, in fact. Can’t boil an aquifer.”

 _We_.

I continued to stare at her, and she shifted uncomfortably, the corners of her lips just barely nudged down, saddened by the fact her factoid had fallen on such unappreciative ears. I was more stuck on the _we_ (I was more stuck on the idea of a _bomb_ in _my shrine_ , but distracting myself with—) a bad habit of hers to always refer to the Fire Nation in the first person plural.

Thinking of it then, I could not recall a single time I heard her refer to the United Kingdom in the first person plural. (It was in times like these that I most felt that gulf between us—that canyon that occasionally made itself known despite the fact we were born in the same year, in the same country—raised to the same television programs, and in the same schools.)

Under my gaze, she grew more worried. Antsy. She did that almost-fidget that she did sometimes, a shift of her shoulders, and twitched of her head to toss back a bang that fell just a little wrong.

“Katara—”

“It’s fine—really—how—” I tried to come upon the appropriate way to respond to the fact that _you can’t boil an aquifer_ , but then just settled on “—interesting.”

Another moment of silence passed between us, but this time it was on her, and she was the one who broke it.

“Yes, well—” she relaxed back into her seat, flicking a hand, “—that particular cell is now dead and gone. We made sure of that.” She fidgeted a bit, as if she was debating saying something before finally giving out and bursting out with, “—honestly, they were asking for it, I mean—it took me five minutes. _Five minutes_. Lin and her band of merry men of course took longer than that,” her voice eased as she got into a good _everyone else is stupid_ rant, “but I’ve really had more interesting cases dealing with _cheating spouses_.” This was quite a statement, actually, considering I knew for a fact Azula hated those cases most of all. Another moment, and she continued to grumble “—more interesting cases have been given to me by _children_ —”

I slowly felt the tension begin to ease away, losing myself in the sea of Azula’s disdain for everyone who is not Azula (and occasionally me).

“— _looking for other children_ —” she continued to grumble, slowly curling back into that ball of hers, picking up her phone and shunting her chin into her neck to glare down at it. “— _stupid children, too_.”

Another long moment and I returned my gaze to my laptop, wiping my only just barely shaking hands lightly on my pants before lifting them to the keyboard and finishing the blog post I had been but only three sentences away from concluding.

That week, I went to the shrine no less than three times—more times, in fact, than I had been to it since I had returned from Afghanistan. More times, really, than I’ve been to it since.

(It’s still standing, though, its building unmolested and its water clear, and that’s what’s important.)


	4. One Year

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> About six months into our companionship, I came home from work to find Azula sitting ponderously in her chair.

About six months into our companionship, I came home from work to find Azula sitting ponderously in her chair. Within her hands was a small, multi-colored token, and she was silently spinning it around and around and around her fingers.

"Azula?" I asked her, mildly concerned—having never seen her so pensive before.

"Hello, Doctor," she said in return, eyes not moving from the token between her fingertips. "How was work?"

I nearly stumbled in surprise. Of the great many things Azula was, curious about my work had never before been one of them. She seemed to have this silent disgust for it—never wanting to get too close to it lest it infect her.

I lowered myself into a my chair across from her, and carefully crossed my legs. "It was okay," I said after a long moment of silence.

"Liar," she muttered under her breath, eyes still not rising from the token before her. "It was awful, wasn't it? Made you reconsider your choice to become a doctor."

I started at her, dumbfounded. It had been a good, long time since she had last turned her rather profound abilities on me.

"How many people did you lose today, my dear Katara?" _My dear Katara_. It was the first time she called me that, although every subsequent calling did not sound anything like this one at all.

It would come to be an expression of a sort of hopeless affection, a time when she found me either so delightfully dense or ignorant that she simply could not help herself. _My dear Katara_.

This time was not like that. This time, she said it without much of any feeling at all—as if it were something she had been considering for a great long time, and it finally just slipped out.

"I imagine it was a lot, wasn't it? Your hands, they're shaking." After a pause she continued. "Your hands don't shake, Katara. Never have. Except, of course, on a _bad_ day. A day so bad that it makes you reconsider everything you've ever done."

She was right. Every word. But the fact remained that she was saying it, and she never had before. She knew how I disliked her little mind games, so she had kept silent for the first six months of our companionship.

And yet, on that day, she had apparently decided that it wasn't worth it anymore.

"What's wrong, Azula?" I asked her, not bothering to address any of her increasingly accurate barbs. "What happened?"

She laughed a sharp laugh, filled with razor blades and dripping with sarcasm.

"Wrong? Nothing's wrong, Katara. I am perfectly—" it was at that moment that she pinched her fingers just a little too tightly together, and the coin was sent flying across the room.

She flew to her feet in an instant, her robe billowing around her, untied, revealing the ragged t-shirt and sweatpants she wore beneath it

She dashed across the room, the robe trailing in her wake, running behind me towards wherever the coin had scuttered off to. After a moment, I could hear her sigh from halfway across the room as she found it.

It was only then that I realized what it was.

"That's a one year sobriety chip, isn't it?" I asked carefully, not turning around.

"That's right, Katara," she whispered, her voice suddenly in my ear from too-close behind me.

She didn't move, not for a good, long moment, reaching one hand out before me, and dropping the chip into my lap.

"I never got any of the others," she continued to whisper. "Never bothered to go to any of those hopeless meetings again after I got this."

I turned the chip over in my hand. Whatever it had once said, it said no longer, wiped clean by years and years of handling.

"You want to know the best part," she whispered, breath still hot in my ear. I didn’t answer, but that didn’t seem to matter to her, and she continued—"I don't know when my anniversary is."

Her hand darted out, and she pulled the chip roughly from my grasp.

"It drives me crazy," she said, head thrown back, as she strode back to her chair. "It makes me want to use again, just so I'll know."

She flopped gracelessly into the chair opposite me, robe spilling completely open. She flipped the coin before her, and then snagged it out if the air.

"I am still _so_ tempted to do it again, just so I'll _know_." She grimaced, and looked down. "Everyone else—they know down to the hour—down to the minute—but I don't. _No_. I have _no idea_."

I opened my mouth to say something—anything—but found myself unable to find anything but the empty platitudes she hated so much.

"I blacked out for three days," she said. "Woke up in the hospital." She shook her head. "I can always guess, of course. It was probably the day before that—but it might have been that morning—or maybe even two days previous."

She twirled the token beneath her fingers in agitation before angrily tossing it into the tray beside her. The tray, I finally realized, that it had always been in, where I’d seen it every day of our companionship, up until that day.

"I'll never know," she said in disgust. "I'll never know the date of the beginning of my own sobriety."

She then leaned back her head, and pinched her eyes closed.

"How many years is it now?" I asked her.

"Seven—eight—I can't be sure."

"That's amazing," I said to her. "I'm so proud of you."

She coughed in amused disgust before dropping her gaze down to me.

"Until this moment, Katara, you didn't have to be."

She was right. But that didn't stop it from being true.


	5. Crime Scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I first went to a crime scene with Azula in our second week of living together.

 I first went to a crime scene with Azula in our second week of living together.

The reason we had been out together on that day eludes me, although I am fairly certain it was due to one of Azula’s subtler machinations. She had a knack for getting me to do what she wanted me to do, even then. The real beauty of the thing was that she could do it without me noticing.

We were walking home from wherever it was we had been when she got a phone call.

“Lieutenant Beifong?” she asked the phone with a tilt of her head. “Do you have a case for me?”

We came to a stop, and I pulled her to the side of the sidewalk when she showed no intention of doing so herself.

She shot me a glare for daring to move her but didn’t interrupt her conversation to protest.

“A crime scene? Lieutenant, you do know what it is that I do, don’t you? I’m not going to—”

She paused, frowning from being no doubt interrupted.

“Fine,” she finally said. “I’ll go. Where is it?”

She nodded along, and then hung up the phone without bothering to say goodbye.

“Katara,” she said with a smile. “Want to go to a crime scene?”

I was momentarily too stunned to respond, so she continued over me.

“Of course you do, what am I saying. Come on,” she said, marching off into the crowd while waving for me to come along behind her back.

“It’s just a couple of blocks away,” she said into the air before her. “A delightful coincidence, is it not?”

It was not what I would have called delightful, but I didn’t go out of my way to tell her I thought so.

We arrived at the crime scene, and she eyed the dead body with mild disgust.

“She keeps doing this,” she said to me, averting her eyes from the body and setting her gaze heavily upon me. “I wonder if she’s trying to come on to me?” The lieutenant approached us, and she gave the lieutenant one glance before turning back to mutter at me, “Nope, still not that.”

When she arrived, the lieutenant’s gaze stuttered on me only briefly before focusing her entire attention on Azula.

“Murder—”

“Yes, I caught that,” Azula muttered under her breath.

“Vic is early forties,” the lieutenant continued over her as if she hadn’t spoken. “Stabbed twice in the—”

“I don’t care,” Azula interrupted. “I have no interest in dead people.”

Lin’s jaw tightened, and she took a deep breath through her nose.

“Although this case seems to be bothering you quite a bit,” Azula added after a moment. “What is it?”

Lin’s eyes slid behind her to the body once more before returning to Azula.

“I don’t like cases like this.”

“What, ones where Fire Nation men get killed on the street?” Azula said, leaning to get another look at the body behind Lin. “Yes, I’m terribly sad about it, too. Just crushing.”

Lin scowled at her, and Azula immediately responded. “What, what are we supposed to call ourselves, these days? Agnians?” Azula’s lips turned up in a smirk. “Oh, how about white? Maybe _pale faces_?”

My face twitched, and Lin’s scowl deepened.

“Let’s you and me go to a tanning salon one of these days, and—”

“There’s something about the witness,” Lin interrupted. “I feel like she’s hiding something.”

And, just like that, Azula’s face brightened into a smile.

“Well, why didn’t you say that from the start?” she asked, already turning away. “Sounds like great fun.” By the time she finished speaking she was already halfway to the woman cowering beneath a blanket by the ambulance.

“Hello, Doctor,” Lin said, turning to me with a smile. “How are you doing this evening.”

I glanced behind her to the newly-dead corpse.

“Well enough, I suppose. Can’t complain.” Better than the man behind me, that was for sure.

We stared awkwardly at each other for another moment, before she turned away.

“Yes, well don’t touch anything. Crime scene, and all that.”

“I’ll go play with Azula.”

“Sounds like a great plan.”

We then headed our different ways, and I approached Azula just as she was putting on her concerned face.

“I want you to know that if you tell me the truth, I will believe you.” She rubbed her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “You can trust me.”

I watched as the woman slowly began to relax, and recalled what Azula had told me after I had first watched her pull that particular trick.

 _Warm hands_ , she had told me. _You’d be surprised how effective just warming your hands just the littlest bits would do._

“Okay?”

After a long moment, the woman gave a stuttering nod, and then choked out a weak , “Okay.”

There is a moment of silence as Azula rubbed the woman’s shoulder.

“So, did you kill him?” the woman jumped beneath Azula’s hand, and then stared up at her in horror.

“No!”

Azula blinked once before smiling widely.

“See, wasn’t that easy?” She rubbed the woman’s shoulder again. “Now I can go tell all the police officers that you didn’t do it and they’ll all leave you alone. Doesn’t that sound great?”

After another moment of silence, the woman nodded hesitantly.

“Fantastic.” Her fingers clenched in the hand she had hidden behind her back. Her eyes glinted in a way that was vaguely manic.

“Now: Do you know that man?”

She unclenched her hand from behind her back before waving in his direction.

“No?” she immediately continued. “And you didn’t see anything, either.”

This was followed by a heavy sigh, before the women even had a chance to respond, and Azula straightened with a second—even heavier—sigh, and turned to me, the woman surely already gone from her mind.

“Wow, that was a waste of time,” she told me, clapping her hands together.

“Azula—” I began, but she immediately blew past me, stomping over to the Lieutenant.

I turned to watch them yell at each other before taking a step towards the woman.

“Are you alright?”

The woman shakily nodded, her gaze still focused on Azula’s wildly gesticulating form.

I turned to watch Azula wave her hands in irritation while Lin stared her down with a frown.

“Great,” I told her. “Then you’re the only one.”

**Author's Note:**

> And that's all, I'm afraid. I have lots of feelings and ideas about this AU, but I have been able to put only these five into words. I hope you enjoyed reading it. I certainly enjoyed writing it.


End file.
